Among the flurry of executive orders that have accompanied the beginning of the second Trump administration, it might be easy to think that the directive entitled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” is by far the most innocuous. After all, what harm could be done by an executive order that federal buildings “should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government”? But this mandate, the reinvention of a 2020 executive order, betrays the complex, arguably sinister, and most certainly ignorant motives behind the Trumpian obsession with neoclassical architecture. Both executive orders are part of the populist far-right’s obsession with the Classics.
While the term “Classics” did not come into common use until the 18th century, the Renaissance saw the emergence of the idea that the cultures and aesthetics of Ancient Greece and Rome were uniquely worthy. The study of the ancient Mediterranean world came to occupy the center of elite education, a position it would hold until the first decades of the 20th century. Consequently, from the Renaissance onward, architecture inspired by the forms of Ancient Greece and Rome belonged to the realm of the elite — a symbol of grandeur, power, and a good education. They were synonymous with establishment and intellectual authority. The people who constructed buildings meant to echo the ancient world, such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome designed in the style of the Pantheon, were intentionally creating spaces meant to exclude all but the most educated and elite. Thus, while it is not unusual for conservatives and reactionaries of various stripes to embrace the Classical tradition as their own, the fact that classical forms have recently become a rallying cry of populists, whose entire worldview is centered around an anti-intellectualism that can safely be boiled down to “owning the elites,” is nothing short of bizarre.
This unexpected development in the long history of Classicism can be most easily attributed to one of the central tenets of the current populist revival: the belief that “Western civilization” (that most nebulous of concepts) is under existential threat. One of the most persistent imagined attributes of Classicism is that Ancient Greece and Rome “founded” Western civilization. The truth, of course, is much more complicated. For one, nobody in the Ancient Greco-Roman world had a concept of “Western civilization,” nor would any denizen of either the Ancient Greek city-states nor the Roman Empire have imagined that they shared a culture with the Germanic tribes who lived north of the Rhine or the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, people to whom they freely applied the term “barbarian.” The concept of Western civilization did not develop until the Renaissance. It formed after the Christianization of Germanic and Slavic peoples in the Early Middle Ages and nine centuries of conflict between Christians and Muslims, beginning with the Arab conquests in the 7th century. These events together united a diverse group of people and gave them a sense of shared identity.
When the armies of the majority-Muslim Ottoman Empire snuffed out the last remnant of the Roman Empire (which, thanks to Renaissance scholars, we now call the Byzantine Empire) in 1453, scholars from the collapsing state fled to Italy and from there spread out to the rest of Western Europe. They brought with them the Greek language and the literature and history of the pre-Christian Mediterranean, a tradition that had been almost entirely lost in Western Europe. It was at this moment that the notion of Classics was born and the ancient, pagan world of Greece and Rome was redeemed as the founder of Christian civilization — a civilization that was simultaneously beginning the modern colonial project in Africa and the Americas in the late 15th century.
It was always a strange and fragile concept, “Western civilization,” one that was unlikely to hold up when truly tested. And it has been tested in the 20th and 21st centuries, as communities across the world rebelled against the colonial project, societies grew more diverse, and the underlying social codes surrounding such fundamental ideas as gender, sex, and the family morphed significantly. Western civilization is not under attack, because no such thing ever existed. Not really. But it makes sense that those who are unhappy with the old world slipping away would cling to the idea. This is particularly true for the traditional White working classes of North America and Europe, the people from whom the new populists derive their power.
Now, some among the educated, upper-middle-class liberals in big cities (who now form the demographic core of the Democratic Party and the American center left), the same people who dominate academia and the arts, have found a new elite form of culture — one that is cosmopolitan, diverse, and, in some cases, actively rejects the forms and principles once guarded by the “Classics.” Many have discarded the myth of Western civilization or have actively set out to destroy it. In their abandonment, the people whom the very elitist notion of the Classics actively excluded for centuries have taken up the cause, deriding the new elite culture as “woke,” among other things, and praising the Classics and Western civilization as the guardian of tradition, a catch-all for what they think has been lost.
That is why Donald Trump, a man with shockingly bad taste, has become somewhat fixated on what federal buildings should look like. It is true that in the early days of the republic, America’s first architectural mode was in the neoclassical style. But the elite 18th-century men who encouraged such aesthetics, such as Pierre Charles L’Enfant (the primary designer of Washington, DC), would likely not be caught dead with them today. Cultural tastes are about belonging as much as anything else, and there is good reason to believe that they would not want to be associated with hollow symbols of nostalgia. This is perhaps the greatest irony of the aesthetics of the new populists: The neoclassical forms they crave appeal to them precisely because they have lost their cultural value. Donald Trump cannot command the resurrection of a fictitious Western civilization nor the classiness of neoclassicism. All he can do, in typical form, is make it even more kitschy.
